Jansson, G; Söderholm, E and Johnsson, H (2008) Design process organisation at industrial house builders: A case study of two timber housing companies in Sweden. In: Dainty, A (ed.) Proceedings of 24th Annual ARCOM Conference, 1-3 September 2008, Cardiff, UK.
Abstract
In industrial construction companies the design process tends to be the bottleneck for further streamlining of the entire manufacturing process. The demands posed on this particular design process are diverse; should feed the production process with data, should satisfy the client with documentation and should document the project for experience feedback. Further complications arise from the internal notion of being a manufacturing company opposed to the external view of the company being a traditional building firm. In this work, the design process at two industrial builders was studied in-depth. The two companies have chosen opposing strategies for their design departments; one have specialised functions where all projects pass and the other have more general designers who work in parallel with similar tasks. With the support from lean production theory, the consequences of these two strategies on succeeding with design of industrial built houses are analysed. The results show that increased specialisation is beneficial in daily work, but can pose a sensitive design process if key competences suddenly vanish.
| Item Type: | Conference Paper (Paper) |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | corporate strategy; design process; housing; industrialisation; prefabrication |
| Index terms: | streamlining, traditional building, strategy, industrial construction, case study, builder, housing, specialization, design process, lean production, designer, manufacturing process, production process, competence, industrialization, corporate strategy, documentation, Sweden, prefabrication |
| Subjects: | practitioner, data collection methods, manufacturing engineering, profession, Geography, construction type, building construction, business, design methods, personnel development, management, economic development, professional development |
| Topics: | Business Strategy, Geographical Context, Governance, Human Resources, Construction Technology, Sustainability, Engineering Principles, Information Management, Design Practice, Roles and Professions, Research Practice |
| Descriptive scope: | 3 PCE |
N.B. Descriptive scope is a count of how many of the five facets of empirical research are indicated by the words used in title, abstract and keywords. It is not intended as a judgement on the research; merely a count of the kind of word we would expect to indicate Phenomenon, Concepts, Theoretical framing, Empirical techniques, Analytical techniques. If all five are present, then a code of “5 PCTEA” will indicate this. If you feel the coding for this record is questionable, we welcome discussion around the terms we matched or the way we categorized them. The facet you would expect may not be coded, or a facet may be coded inappropriately. This can also bear on a larger question, of which facets should be treated as defining in construction management research. Please get in touch, and we will look at it. More details here